Parking policy: The socio-legal architecture of parking bays in American cities

Sarah Marusek

Land Use Policy, 2020, vol. 91, issue C

Abstract: In Western vehicularized society, we are constructed by lines. We wait in queues while stuck in traffic, waiting for a morning coffee, even to receive basic governmental entitlements. Lines perpetuate order in an otherwise world of chaos. Lines frame how we distinguish between order and chaos. In parking, lines frame a legitimized rectangle of vehicular occupancy. In other words, the marked parking space is ours for a little while *if* we park within the lines. The legal aesthetic of lines designating parking spaces on pavement symbolizes a legal landscape of cars and people. This performance of law that keeps us ‘in line’ is a really a construction of order designed according to the spatiality of belonging (Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, 2015). Whether on streets or in lots, pavement that is painted for parking is a site of legal culture. This material spatialization perpetuates a map of life based upon vehicular size and designated usage. The cultural architecture of these lines spatially engenders the paved environment (Dovey, 2009; Lefebvre, 1991) and generates a form visual legal pollution that further contributes to the nomospheric occupancy of place in everyday life (Delaney, 2010). Yet, everyday resistance to such linear normativity (Barr, 2015) disrupts the normative ordering of place and tests the socio-legal imagination.

Keywords: Parking (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:lauspo:v:91:y:2020:i:c:s0264837718313310

DOI: 10.1016/j.landusepol.2019.03.044

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